


Limelight, Candlelight, Sunlight, Shadows

by Muccamukk



Category: Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: 5 Things, Acting, Character Study, Gen, Personal Growth, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, Technology, Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-10 15:06:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12914448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Five decades, five plays: Kirsten stepping on stage in a changing world.





	Limelight, Candlelight, Sunlight, Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fingers2keys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fingers2keys/gifts).



> Thank you to Valtyr and Prinzenhasserin for beta reading, and to everyone else for support and brainstorming.

**Kirsten at Eight Years Old: _King Lear_ by William Shakespeare**  
"It's a stupid game," Matilda says, then ignores Kirsten's glare.

"Don't say things are stupid," Tanya corrects absently, not glancing up from her phone.

"Well it _is_ ," Matilda insists. "Why are we clapping like babies? Why don't we play My Little Pony or Angry Birds?"

Kirsten rolls her eyes, though she'd be the first to switch to any game that didn't involve touching Matilda every night and twice on weekends.

The director, passing through the wings, pats Matilda's head, lightly enough so as not to disarrange the silk flowers braided into her hair. "Children didn't always have computer games, darling," he tells her.

Matilda frowns like she's pretty sure that's not right, and states, "They always had My Little Pony. My _mom_ says she had My Little Pony."

Kirsten watches the director's face: he presses his lips together, but his eyes crinkle, so she doesn't think he's mad at Matilda, even if she deserves it. "I suppose they did," he says, which surprises Kirsten, "but the audience can see the clapping game better; toy animals would be too small." Then he's gone, back towards the dressing rooms, and Matilda's lost her chance to complain, at least for tonight. She glares at his back and stomps her foot in a way that even Kirsten knows they're too old for.

Tanya frowns at both of them, then says with painted on cheer, "Just about time to go on, girls! The doors will be opening in five minutes."

As they leave the wings, Kirsten tries to see what the director meant, and how the audience would see them. The lights on the stage look soft, but even little girls cast giants' shadows in five directions, and when they play the clapping game, she knows their shadows will slash across the whole stage. It won't be like the bright stage lights that follow the bigger roles, or the hide-and-seek flashes of the thunderstorm—which was Kirsten's favourite part of rehearsals—but full of its own drama.

She decides then that she's going to learn how the lights work, and everything else about the stage. Her mom might like the money from advertisements, but this is where Kirsten wants to spend her life. She knows that someday the spotlight will be hers, too.

 

 **Kirsten at Eighteen Years Old: _Romeo and Juliet_ by William Shakespeare**  
They've taken over the Mackinaw City bandstand, pinning the Verona backdrop across the back and then extending it out over the lawn to pin it onto the trucks, a stage left and right, of a sort. They were late getting started and are going to have to clip along if they don't want to do the crypt scene in the dark.

Kirsten stands barefoot on the grass behind the sheet, waiting for her cue. The back of her wrist still stings from the second knife tattoo, which is not yet an hour old.

"Are you sure you want to go on?" Dieter asks gently. It had been a more useful question before he'd repeated it twice, when Kirsten hadn't been wearing a pink nightie with her eyes lined in charcoal and wearing cherry juice for lipstick. The juice is too dark: Juliet with blood on her lips. She wonders if the audience will she the blood on her hands, too. She should be playing Lady M.

"I'll be fine," she says, and only doesn't kiss his cheek because she doesn't want to transfer her make up; Dieter is playing Capulet, her father, and is magisterial in a three-piece suit and bowler hat, and re-entering covered in kisses would make a different play entirely. "Besides, this is my big break, isn't it?"

Dieter tips his hat to her now. "We can delay your staring role one night, I think. Under the circumstances. Sarah can step in."

Kirsten shakes her head. Whether she chooses playing the lead, or rotating through three or four second messengers and third citizens as she's been doing up until now, or sitting out the play entirely, she'll still see the bandit's face every time she closes her eyes, hear him choking on his blood and her knife. Better to be someone else, a girl of not-yet fourteen who's only just starting to learn the price her world demands of her. "I want to go on," she tells him.

"All right. Don't forget that we're out there, too. Sayid and I will look after you," Dieter says, then puts a hand on her shoulder, and ducks a little to look right into her eyes. His face is so kind that Kirsten has to swallow to keep from tearing up and streaking the charcoal around her eyes. He waits, watching her, and when she's calm again, he nods to her. "And don't forget the post in the middle of the stage, I nearly walked into it in the first scene. Let Nurse keep the laughs."

"I won't," Kirsten promises, then hears her cue, and steps through a gap in the sheets and out into the afternoon sun, saying, "How now! who calls?"

 

 **Kirsten at Twenty-Eight Years Old: _Antigone_ by Sophocles**  
"Do you think this is a good idea?" Kirsten asks. She can hear the murmur of the crowd seated in the old movie theatre, the theatre that is brilliant with real electric light, though the cement corridors of the wings are candlelit and dim.

"No," the conductor tells her. "I think this is the fucking stupidest thing we've ever done. Which is up against some fucking stupid competition."

The familiar profanity does not make the rocks at the bottom of Kirsten's stomach go away. "Do you think it will work?"

"No," the conductor says again, but her smile is grim. "But no one had a better idea." Then she stalks off to make the preparations for plan B, the one they were almost certainly going to have to use.

Kirsten nods and tugs her dress straight. Someone at the Airport had made a set out of bed sheets, basing the pattern on the robe on the cover of the play. Conceptually they're gorgeous; practically, the collar of Kirsten's keeps riding up under her chin on the left side and the hem is too long. "I really am going to break a leg," she mutters.

"That will distract them. I won't have to go on at all." Eleanor says, far too brightly. Her face is pale, and Kirsten can tell that she's remembering St. Deborah by the Water and how the Prophet had nearly taken her as his fifth wife. She's too young for the part of Ismene, but she's been learning it for weeks, and she'll be even less useful in a fight.

On stage, Gil is explaining the context of the play, and they have a few minutes left on that, so Kirsten takes Eleanor's hands in hers. "Listen," she says, "we wouldn't have traded you even when you were a stranger, we protected you. Imagine what we'll do now that you're a member of the Symphony."

Eleanor smiles at her as if they were real sisters, not just playing them. "Do you think it will work?"

Kirsten almost says that it won't out of hand, like the conductor had. Does she really think that a play, even put on by the best and only company in the region, even for a community unused to theatre, can change the heart of a dictator bent on owning that very theatre company like monkeys in a dimly-remembered zoo? Had _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ made a jot of difference to the Prophet? Kirsten wets her lips before saying, "Sometimes, miracles do happen."

"Right," Eleanor says, and her voice sounds like the conductor's now, even though she of all people must remember escape as a divine mercy. Maybe she just doesn't believe it can happen more than twice.

Onstage, Gil is winding down. Kirsten squeezes Eleanor's hands before pulling away and straightening her collar again. "Remember, you're my sister, the last person in my family left alive, and the king has just laid a trap that could kill us both. If you feel trapped, use it. If you're afraid, use that too."

If anything, Eleanor turns even paler, but she presses her lips together and nods.

"Ready?"

Another nod.

Kirsten isn't sure she is, but she knows that elsewhere the conductor is planning a more active escape than persuasion by Sophocles. One that means putting their smallest cast on stage, the roles tripled like in the old days, and she takes heart from that. 

When Gil ducks back behind the curtain (a real curtain), and smiles like he's been stabbed but isn't going to let them see him bleed, Kirsten hikes up her skirts, grabs Eleanor's hand again and pulls her out into the bright electric lights of the stage, the first she's stood under in twenty years.

 

 **Kirsten at Thirty Eight Years Old: _Woods_ by Sidney Roche**  
"We should have just done the play on the boat in the middle of the river, like the clarinet wanted," Kirsten mutters. She spreads her stance, but it still feels like the sturdy oak boards of the church dais are rocking under her. Her bad knee is getting worse, especially in this damp spring weather, and she shifts her weight to protect it.

"I said I changed my mind," the clarinet mutters sulkily. She's caught between being a bundle of nerves and resenting the people that keep teasing her for having stage jitters after so long with the Travelling Symphony.

Kirsten doesn't remind her that changing her mind is half the reason she gets teased as much as she does, since lord knows how many production changes the premiere performance of _Woods_ has gone through before its first showing in this hamlet on the banks of the Tennessee. The lord and Sayid, who's been keeping a tally. "It's going to be all right," she promises the clarinet. "This will work better." And it will be, least of all because the stage is not moving, but because the late morning light through the church's windows stains the dais a dozen jewel tones, making a fairyland of it without any backdrop. Kirsten pictures how that will illuminate all of the characters' white costumes. "It's going to be beautiful."

In a minute, the townsfolk will start arriving—an afternoon play in a town still without electricity—and Kirsten takes one last look at the dais and lets the clarinet hand her down. They go back into the candlelit church hall serving as their backstage. Annabel is waiting there with two men Kirsten hasn't seen before.

One is a teenager, perhaps a little older than Annabel's, the children of the survivors, and the other is greying and a little stooped.

"We're going on in ten," Kirsten reminds Annabel, but the girl is bouncing, and Kirsten doesn't have the heart to dismiss her guests. "Who is this now?"

The teen is Frank, the old man, his father, is Jeevan, the doctor from the town further up the river. "When dad heard about the Symphony, he said we had to come down. He's never left our town before, not that I remember."

"We're heading up river in a week," Kirsten says. They're going as far up the Tennessee river as the keelboats will take them, the Symphony's great experiment this year. The faster the river flows, and the harder the horses work, the more towns they find that have worked out hydro. "We sent a playbill ahead."

Frank is nodding, saying that's what he told his father, but Jeevan is staring at her face. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, then finally he licks his lips. He must be close to sixty, and people still don't live very long, so Kirsten expects his words to be shaky, his speech blurred with age, but he has a strong, clear voice. "Do you still play Cordelia?" he asks.

Kirsten in turn looks at his face, but she doesn't remember him in the last fifteen years of audiences, and they've never been here before. "No, I play Reagan now, Eleanor is our Cordelia. We're doing _Lear_ tomorrow, if you can stay."

Jeevan's breath catches, and his eyes water. "I haven't seen _King Lear_ performed in a long time," he says. "A very long time."

"We'd love to stay," Frank adds, though he's still looking at his father with concern and some confusion. It's the first time, Kirsten thinks, that Frank has put much thought into who his father was before.

"Make sure they have a good seat," Kirsten tells the clarinet, who is hovering, trying not to vibrate down through the decrepit carpet into the church basement. "I'm on in a minute."

She turns to go, but Jeevan catches her sleeve, and says with surprising force, "After the show tomorrow, I will tell you about the last _Lear_ I saw."

"Dad," Frank protests, but Kirsten nods.

"Yes," she says. "I would like that."

And then she walks back into the church, and climbs the dais. She's holding a letter, and her first line will be, "Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest."

 

 **Kirsten at Forty Eight Years Old: _Station Eleven_ by Miranda Carroll, adapted by Kirsten Raymonde and Sidney Roche**  
"I'm going to throw up," Kirsten says.

The clarinet—whose arthritis has had her writing plays instead of playing for the last decade, but is still stuck with her Symphony name—laughs at her. It's too high, and slightly panicky.

"Oh stop it," Kirsten mutters. She really does feel sick, and her knee hurts like a bastard. It's never been the same since it took an arrow in Battle Creek, that first city of lights south of the Airport. "You're as wound up as I am. You always are."

Sayid is adjusting his fedora, and tugging at the edges of his overcoat, which isn't falling right, and oh, god they should have weighted the edges. The hat brim is going to shadow his face for the whole play, and this is the worst idea Kirsten has ever had. She hasn't thought through how the overhead lights would change how things look. She makes herself smile, which settles her stomach a little. "Ready?" she asks.

"Of course," he says, and she may have watched Sayid grow from her Romeo to her Macbeth to her Lear, but that smug self-assurance that had made her want to kiss and slap him at the same time has never wavered. He tips his hat back a little, clearing his face, and his smile takes twenty years off his age. He's leaner and darker than Doctor Eleven in the comics, and Kirsten wonders again if there was a model, and if he survived.

Kirsten takes a breath. "Of course," she replies. "At least we're putting up something pretty for them to look at." Even if her script sucks, they'll be dazzled by the lights and painted backdrops, and hopefully won't notice. Someday, she may even get it to look like she wants, original art projected onto rippling silk: a backdrop of water and bridges, twilight in a drowned world. Some day they may find another cache of Miranda Carroll's art, like the one they'd trade for the year before.

Sayid heads for the wings, lifting his hat long enough to kiss Kirsten's cheek as he passes. "Thank you, my dear," he says. "I think you're pretty too."

"Thank you," she murmurs, too quiet for him to hear under the purr of the ethanol generators that are bringing this old theatre to life.

"You ready?" the clarinet asks, and Kirsten nods stiffly. "Then you better go on, Doctor Eleven."

Kirsten almost to protests that Sayid is Doctor Eleven, but she understands then that in a way she is too, and so was Miranda. She says nothing, but smiles and steps into the spotlight. Her play begins.


End file.
